Page 54 of There is No Devil

He leans forward, his voice low and steady.

“Was Erin perceptive? Would she have warned Mara about you?”

I snort. “Nobody needs warning about me. It’s well known that I’m an asshole.”

“You’ve made enemies.”

“Only boring people are universally beloved.”

“Take Carl Danvers, for instance.”

Now a chill falls between us, which I have to pretend to ignore with every fiber of my being.

“Who?” I say.

“He was a critic for theSiren.”

“Oh, right,” I say dismissively.

“He disappeared thirteen weeks ago. All his belongings are still in his apartment. No message to anyone.”

“Your point?”

“He was no fan of yours. Wrote a scathing article about you the week he disappeared.”

“People write about me every day.”

“Did you speak to him at Oasis?”

This is a trick. Danvers was already dead the night of the show. His bones resided inside my sculpture, on display for all to see.

Hawks is testing to see if I’ll correct him, to judge how closely I followed the disappearance, and how well I know my own timeline.

“Jesus, who knows. I probably talked to fifty people that night.”

“But you don’tremember,” Hawks sneers, his disdainful expression showing exactly what he thinks about that.

Enough obfuscating. It’s time for Hawks to take a punch in return.

“This is pathetic,” I sneer. “If this is all you have … missing art critics, conversations that nobody heard and timelines that no one can pin down … the SFPD is grasping at straws. Mara will be disappointed. Sounds like you’ve got no fucking clue what happened to her roommate.”

Hawks snaps back, “Our profiler says the person who arranged that body fancies themself an artist and a genius. Sound familiar?”

“Oh, wow.” I roll my eyes. “Did they also guess it was a white male? Hope Captain Obvious isn’t getting a Christmas bonus.”

“You think this is funny?” Hawks hisses.

“Well, you sure as fuck can’t be serious,” I say, pushing back my chair and standing up from the table. “Because this interview was a joke.”

Striding over the conference room door, I wrench it open and call to Janice, “See Officer Hawks out, will you, Janice? Sounds like he’s got a lot of work to do.”

With that, I leave Hawks stewing in my disdain.

I’m a good enough actor that I don’t think I showed any nerves.

But in truth, it rankled me that he connected the dots to Danvers.

Goddamn Shaw for shoving us both under the microscope. This is all his fucking fault. I’ve never had a cop so much as look my way before this. Now they have a fucking description of me. They’ll be watching everything I do.

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